Penguins are Social Animals

iPeng for iPhone 1.3.4 and iPeng for iPad 1.1.4 bring some new feature Coolio has been demanding for a long time now: getting social about your music.

Be Social About Your Music

Now what is this about? Oh yes, they needed to add “Twitter” and “Facebook” to the App description – yawn. Is that it? No, it isn’t.

It’s about sharing what you listen to with your friends and – just as important – discovering what they listen to! And, most importantly, to be able to do that not only on your computer or the iPhone itself but also through your Squeezebox and your HiFi equipment.

And if you don’t use any Social Networks, you can just as well use E-Mail and get the same thing.

Here’s what it really is:

1. Share What You Listen To…

iPeng now has a new Context Menu item for the current track and the tracks in the current playlist. It allows you to tell others what you listen to via E-Mail or Twitter or Facebook. By default it will send the title, artist and album (you can of course edit that) and – most importantly – whenever a link is available that can be played (as is the case for services like Spotify, Rhapsody, YouTube or radio stations) that link will be sent, too. So your friends don’t just know, what you are listening to, they can just click the link and listen to it, too.

I don’t know about you, but for Coolio, his friends are an important source to learn about new music so this is really cool.

Which brings us to part

2. … and listen to what others share

Of course you not only want to tell others what you listen to, you also want to learn about their music. Ever got frustrated that you could also play these links they post on a computer or a phone but not on serious audio equipment? No longer. With iPeng you can now play this directly on your Squeezebox. This currently works for streams and single tracks from Internet Radio stations, Last.fm, Napster (you can send links for iPeng only, but playing Napster links should work), Pandora, Rhapsody, Slacker, Spotify, WiMP, YouTube (Squeezebox Server with YouTube plugin required).

Some new Apps

E-Mail sharing will work immediately but you can also use Twitter or Facebook. To do that, iPeng adds a new category to the App Gallery menu: iPeng Apps. Here you can enable iPeng’s own Facebook and Twitter features that allow you to tweet and post as well as read timelines and walls.

Now wait, didn’t the Squeezebox (and iPeng) already have a Facebook App? Yes, but it’s not as useful as iPeng’s. iPeng will replace it with it’s own, because iPeng’s simply is more versatile in this context.

Actually, it’s not even any special App or functionality, it’s just Facebook as you know it on your iPhone or iPad but with the added extra feature that iPeng will recognize playable links and not just follow them but offer you to play them on your Squeezebox. And if a link goes to a web site first which then contains the music link, just follow it, browse the web site and when you encounter the music link, you can play it as well.

Twitter has it’s own Timeline in iPeng but apart from that, it works just the same.

So Coolio now wishes you a good time sharing music with your friends.

What else?

Ok, it’s been a while since the last update, so there are also some other new features to be had:

Browse Wikipedia for information about what you are listening to, by artist, album or title. And if you encounter playable music, you can just send it to your Squeezebox again.

iPeng now shows an AirPlay control for the iPeng Player if there is an AirPlay device on the network, so you don’t have to use the task bar four audio routing.

There is a new behavior for the PlayNext feature. Whenever you select PlayNext and your player is currently off or paused, iPeng will start playback with that song you add to the playlist so it’s a way to have a Play command that does not delete your current playlist.

Plus a lot of other detailed improvements and behind the scenes improvements like support for Squeezebox Server 7.6.